LHC breaks its own energy record, still less powerful than Lady Gaga

The Large Hadron Collider is no stranger to setting energy records: back at the end of November it broke the 0.98 TeV record by hitting the 1.18 TeV mark. Well, the problem beleaguered collider's just handily surpassed itself -- this time with a truly stunning 3.5 TeV -- with beams of protons on record as having circulated at 3.5 trillion electron volt. Now, we're not scientists or anything, but that sure is a lot of volts! CERN's moving on later this week and will begin colliding the beams so they can check out the tiniest particles within atoms in the hopes of finding out more about how matter's made up. We look forward to hearing all about that, too -- but until then, we made do by reading the source over and over.